South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem (R) is taking heat online following a brutal interview with Face the Nation’s Margaret Brennan, who pressed Noem on several of the details in her forthcoming book. Not only does Noem claim to have met North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, but even makes an apparent threat against President Joe Biden’s dog.
Brennan first addressed the false claim that Noem met with Jong Un, noting that she had written: “I remember when I met with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, I’m sure he underestimated me having no clue about my experience staring down little tyrants. I’ve been a children’s pastor, after all.”
Noem never explicitly stated she did not meet with Jong Un, but countered that she has met with “many, many world leaders” and that when that specific anecdote was brought to her attention, they made edits.
“I’m glad that this book is being released in a couple of days, and that those edits will be in place, and that people will have the updated version,” Noem said, later adding that she is “not going to talk about [her] specific meetings with world leaders.”
Noem then claimed to have visited North Korea, citing her trip to the Korean Demilitarized Zone—a heavily fortified buffer zone between the two Koreas that serves as a popular tourist attraction accessible from the South Korean side.
In a statement to the Associated Press, Noem’s spokesperson attributed the error to the ghostwriter and stated that future editions about the Jong Un anecdote will be corrected.
But Brennan on Sunday pushed back, noting that Noem released a video of herself recording an audio version of the book.
“You didn’t catch these errors when you were recording it?” she asked.
Noem reiterated that the issue was corrected as soon as she was made aware of it, before deflecting and arguing that Biden slips up and makes errors frequently.
“This is what is so discouraging about politics in the media today, is that we have the White House that just recently came out and confirmed that President Joe Biden has misspoken, has made mistakes, has even outright lied over close to 150 times just this year, and you’ve done nothing to question him on any of that,” Noem replied. “And you’re talking about a book that hasn’t been released yet that’s been corrected before it’s been released.”
Brennan countered that if she were to interview Biden, she’d press him on his record, and went on to address another controversial segment of Noem’s book—her tale of shooting her 14-month-old puppy, Cricket, after failing to train her to hunt.
“I just wonder why you concluded that a young dog was untrainable and not just take it to a shelter?” Brennan asked.
“This dog was a working dog and it had come from a family that already had issues with this dog,” Noem countered. “And I had put months and months of training into this dog. This dog had gone to other trainers as well.”
Brennan also noted that Noem wrote of killing one of her farm’s goats after shooting Cricket because he smelled and would chase the kids, noting, “it seems like you’re celebrating the killing of the animals.”
Noem argued the story has been used to attack her for years and that she wants “the truth to be out there and to understand that these animals were attacking [her] children.” (Cricket was previously dubbed by her as solely a threat to livestock and even recounted in the book that her daughter asked where Cricket was after being killed.)
The South Dakota governor went on to defend an apparent veiled threat she made against Biden’s dog, Commander, in the book, where she wrote that if she was vice president, she would make sure Commander is nowhere near the White House, adding, “Commander say hello to Cricket.”
“Joe Biden’s dog has attacked 24 Secret Service people,” Noem said, noting the aggression that prompted Biden to eventually send Commander away to relatives. “So how many people is enough people to be attacked and dangerously hurt before you make a decision on a dog?”
The interview was brutally mocked on social media, with one person joking that “Face the Nation just did to Kristi Noem what she did to Cricket.”
“Due to mounting pressure from a biased media, Kristi Noem has decided to retract all imaginary interactions with world leaders from her upcoming biography,” cracked someone else.
“I really did not expect Kristi Noem to try and justify the puppy theriocide by making the argument that Biden was too soft on Commander and if she was in the White House she would show toughness and decisiveness by hauling him to a gravel pit and whacking him too,” commented attorney and prominent anti-Trump poster Ron Filipkowski. “But she did.”
Reacted Megyn Kelly: “She is humiliating herself daily now.”
And Noem’s apparent threat against Commander revived criticism in the GOP and cast doubt on her vice presidential prospects.
“There’s gotta be some kind of happy medium between ‘allowing your German Shepherd free rein to bite dozens of Secret Service agents’ and ‘executing your puppy in a gravel pit,’” commented Christina Pushaw, an aide to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. “Perhaps just … don’t get a dog if you can’t commit to training & caring for it properly?”
“I still say the outrage over Noem killing the dog 20 years ago is wildly overblown and ridiculous but on a purely political level I have never seen any politician torpedo their career so quickly, efficiently, and most of all hilariously,” said right-wing commentator Matt Walsh.
Since revealing the tale of killing Cricket, the odds of Noem becoming Donald Trump’s running mate have plummeted 83%, according to the online prediction market PredictIt.
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